Jake Salem stepped up to the casket, and said in a loud clear voice, “I loved you Hanna like I hadn’t loved anyone in years. You showed me that I could love again and be happy. I will miss you always. I vow before God and these friends, I will not let your death kill what you gave me: happiness.”
Jake looked from side to side at the others who loved his special lady and smiled. As tears ran down his cheeks, he kissed the flower and placed it on the casket.
Chapter Fourteen
Cole fell fathoms into his leather couch. He would meet Kelly for dinner but for now he needed time to think, reflect, and remember. His thoughts were interrupted with the ringing of the phone.
“Cole, its Ben.”
“Well, hello.”
“How you doin’, Cole?” Ben asked.
“It’s been a rough couple of days.”
“I have some news and I wanted to tell you myself, before Mom or Erin spoiled it.” Both men laughed. Then Ben continued, “I’ve decided not to go to Houston.”
“That is news,” Cole said in disbelief. “That’s a Texas-size turn of events.”
“This thing with Hanna made me realize, none of us knows how much time we have in this life. I just don’t want to be that far away from mom, or you for that matter. Erin hasn’t made her feelings a secret either. God has brought this family together from broken pieces. I will not be the one to tear it apart.”
“You’re a good man, Ben. So good in fact, I would like you to be my best man,” Cole offered.
“I would be honored. When?” Ben was the surprised one now.
“As soon as I can get your mom to do it. We’ve put it off long enough. All the planning in the world can be for naught in a second. I’ve learned that far too well this week.”
“Can I tell Erin?”
“You’re the Doctor. I think it would be a blessing all around. But, let me tell your mom first. Deal?”
“You got it. Thanks, Cole,” Ben said softly, then the line was silent.
Cole forced himself to go to work on Monday. The empty desk where Hanna’s cheerful welcome greeted him every morning looked like a tombstone. There were no pictures. She’d had no one. The few mementos seemed forlorn, without life or purpose. Cole looked at some of them for the first time. Perhaps they meant something to Hanna, but the rest of the world wasn’t in on the joke. Did he even know her, really, he thought?
He picked up the notebook she kept. The last entry was “Dinner with Jake” and she drew little hearts at each end of his name. The poor dear, Cole thought, she finally found someone. He closed the notebook and went to his desk.
The first order of business was to contact Jim Tamarance at Stanford University. The decision was made, he would accept the job, if indeed they would hire Randy Callen.
Cole looked down at the yellow pad where he scribbled the number. “Let’s do this,” he said aloud and dialed the number.
“Dean Tamarance’s office.” The woman who answered sounded friendly and welcoming.
“Good morning, Cole Sage for Dr. Tamarance.”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Sage, I was told to expect your call and I’ll put you through right away.”
Cole heard a click, a ring, and then: “Good Morning, Cole. First of all let me say how dreadfully sorry I am to hear about Ms. Day. It must be a tremendous loss.”
“More than I realized. I think it’s just starting to really sink in.”
“I can only imagine. Is there anything I can do to help?”
“That is very gracious, but I’m afraid she was one of a kind.” Cole felt a wave of emotion come over him. He cleared his throat. ‘I would like to accept your offer, if it is still open.”
“We feel that you are one of a kind as well, and we will be thrilled to bring you into our Stanford family.” Tamarance’s voice betrayed his pleasure.
“Just to clarify, my assistant Randy Callen will come on board as well? That was verified?”
“Absolutely. You will have a support team of three. Mr. Callen, of course, and then it will be your decision as to whether you want an actual secretarial position filled, or an administrative assistant. Academically, you will have your choice of applicant Doctoral candidates as a teaching assistant. Your tutorage and serving on their advisory committee will, of course, be credited as one of your courses. I am so pleased you’ve decided to come on board.”
“I am humble and honored to be accepted into such prestigious company. I am truly grateful.”
“Can we meet this week sometime?”
“You name it. My calendar will be free beginning tomorrow.”
“How about Wednesday morning at ten?” Tamarance asked.
“Perfect,” Cole replied.
“See you then!”
“See you then,” Cole agreed, and hung up the phone.
“Well, isn’t that something. You hear that, Mick? I’m teaching at Stanford!” Cole said looking heavenward. “Betcha didn’t see that coming!”
Cole could just see Mick Brennan, his old boss and mentor, sitting at his desk at the Chicago Sentinel. “Not bad, son, not bad at all.” Cole wished Mick could have lived to see it.
He punched four in-house numbers into the phone.
“Research.”
“Randy, this is Cole. Can you come up and see me?”
“On my way.”
“Thanks.” Cole set the handset in its cradle.
He pulled the bottom drawer of his desk open and took out a yellow note pad. While he waited for Randy to arrive, Cole reviewed several pages of notes, sketches, and diagrams. The pad was covered with both pencil and ink writing, and scribbled-through paragraphs. Ten pages of Cole’s future. To anyone else, it would be a bunch of illegible phrases, circles, asterisks, underlines, and arrows.
To Cole it was a master plan, a manifesto or thesis, to guide the rest of his working life. Near the top, written in clear, bold, black felt-tip pen, and underlined twice, was the name Randy Callen. It was the plan Cole sketched before the Stanford offer, and the changes of the last week.
“Hello,” Randy said, standing in Cole’s office doorway.
“Come in, please.” Cole waved Randy Callen to the chair in front of his desk.
“How you doin’?” Randy said somberly.
“Kind of in a funk, to tell the truth. I miss that crazy assistant of mine. I never knew how much I cared for her…” Cole let his words drift away.
“It is going to be weird.”
“Let’s agree to carry on like she would want us to. We both know she would give us a good scolding if she saw us moping around.”
“I can almost hear it now: ‘Would you two quit sucking on lemons! We don’t have time for pity parties!’” Randy laughed at his own impression of Hanna.
Cole smiled, still unable to get to a laugh. “So let’s change the subject!”
“I detest the new management. Thank goodness, I’m in a basement, or I might jump out the window.” The remark was meant to be funny. It wasn’t. “How’s that?”
“How long have we known each other?” Cole asked.
“Well, I’ve been here five years. I think we met, I don’t know, six months before?” Randy frowned wondering where this was going.
“Are you happy with where you live?”
“Not really. I have three roommates with whom I could definitely do without. Why do you ask?” Randy leaned back and pulled a crumpled packet of gum from his pocket. “Want one?”
“Not for me, thanks. If it is not too personal, how are you set, financially I mean? Could you afford to move?”
Randy shrugged. “My grandma left me a little bit. I still have all of it.” Randy rubbed his face with his deformed hand. “You know something I don’t know, Cole? You breaking a fall or something here?”
Cole tapped the ring on his right hand on the table twice, then raised his hand, fingers spread wide. “There are fewer than five people in the world I trust who aren’t family. One, I just buried.” Cole folded down his index fing
er. “Another is sitting in front feet of me. You, my friend, are the thumb.” He snapped his hand to a thumbs up. “I can always count on you to give it to me like it is: good, bad, stop, go, insane idea or solid thinking. As a researcher, you have never let me down. Your willingness to do your Internet snooping, well, we’ll keep that between us.”
Randy tried to speak, but Cole stopped him with a raised palm.
“Look, I am a banana that is starting to turn brown, around here. I pretty much—no, I totally—blew off an assignment the new editor gave me. I think down deep I wanted him to fire me. It’s time for me to quit. I’ve been offered a teaching job at Stanford. I need to—what it is they always say about Madonna?—oh, yes, reinvent myself”
“That’s what they say.” Randy grinned wondering what might come next.
Cole lifted the yellow pad. “This is my parachute. This is my idea. Now, it may be as realistic as a kid in Kansas trying out for a surfing team. I may be imagining things differently than the way they work in the real world. That’s where you come in.”
“I’m in.” Randy sat up straight, his body language left no doubt he would jump with Cole.
“You better look before you leap,” Cole chuckled. “I appreciate your spirit, but the parachute might have some suspension lines missing. It might even have holes in it.”
“What are you thinking?”
“This is the digital age as you’re always telling me. There are websites everywhere with news, and commentary. Blogs, podcasts, stuff like that, right? They all require writers. Is it possible to do one of those things of my own?”
“You could do them all on your own,” Randy replied.
“But do they, can they, make money?”
“Depends on who you are. Let’s take inventory here: famous, award-winning journalist, opinionated, good talker (that’s for the podcast) passable looks.” Randy smiled “Seems to me you’ve got the bases covered.”
“What does it take? Moneywise, what is the investment?”
“Time, consistency, not getting bored and quitting, and a faithful, tech-genius-sidekick, to put it all together. When do we start?”
“I already told Stanford I won’t come without you,” Cole said.
“Me? At Stanford? Are you kidding?” Randy was dumbstruck.
“I told them you’re the best researcher I’ve ever worked with. I don’t think that they even blinked before they said you were in,” Cole reassured him.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything. Back to the other idea; could an online venture really earn us an income, a real income? Because I am willing to walk out that door right now, but I still gotta work. If this teaching thing goes south…” Cole’s uncertainty was showing.
“I’m good for six months. How long can you go without a check?” Randy asked.
“A while longer than that,” Cole replied. “But you’d still have a job.”
“Not without you. We’re a team. We got this, Cole. You’ll have to produce a lot of copy. Weekly blog entries, podcasts, interviews, twitter feeds—there will be a lot of balls in the air. Down side: you’ll have to edit and proof your own stuff. That’s way above my pay grade.”
“The writing isn’t a problem, and I can get more interviews than we could ever print. It’s an election year don’t forget. But the editing and proofing—that’s my Achilles’ heel…make that leg!”
“So, you hire a grad student.” Randy gave a confident shrug.
“I was going to ask Hanna to go with us.” Cole raised his eyebrows.
“She would have loved it.” Randy grinned.
“So how’s tomorrow look? To walk, I mean.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Randy said. “Yeah, sure. Why not!”
Cole laughed. He needed it. “Did you ever see Zorba the Greek? Great old movie. There’s a scene where Anthony Quinn—he plays Zorba—approaches Alan Bates, an English guy, and asks him to buy him a ticket to the next island. The Englishman is stunned by the request and says to Zorba, ‘Why would I do that?’ Without missing a beat, Zorba says, ‘For the hell of it! Haven’t you ever done anything just for the hell of it?’ The Englishman buys him a ticket. That scene reminds me of us.” Cole laughed again.
His analogy was lost one Randy. “How’s that?”
“This, my son, is your Zorba moment!”
Cole knocked on Kelly’s door. He stood a bouquet of daisies in hand, waiting and thinking how lucky she was to housesit such an incredible place. He smiled at the thought of having the woman he loved living on Lombard Street. He turned and watched a pair of cars rolling down the “crookedest street in the world.”
The door opened behind him and Kelly said, “There’re my sweeties!”
Cole turned, thrusting the flowers forward, and smiled.
“What a pleasant surprise. They’re beautiful! You’re early.” Kelly threw her arms around Cole’s waist and hugged him.
“Guess that means I can come in?” Cole said.
“I have been thinking about you all day. I was about to call and see if you wanted to have take-out.” Kelly took him by the hand and led him inside. “Are you doing OK?”
“I’d been lying if I said I was doing fine. I really missed Hanna today. I actually called to her once. I felt so foolish,” Cole said making his way to the couch.
“When someone is part of your life, and you spend so much time with them, their death doesn’t just erase them from your heart and mind,” Kelly said. “I remember once after Peter died, I was watching a movie on TV, and asked him what the guy just said in the movie. I even looked over at his chair, expecting to see him there. It’s hard. I’m so sorry you lost your friend.”
“I wonder if I’ll ever get over feeling somehow responsible.”
“There is no way you could have known. No way. You wanted to help the girl become a writer. Hanna took her in. Big difference there. You are not responsible in any way for what happened, my darling.” Kelly was seeing a crack in Cole’s vulnerability, one he had never exposed before.
Hanna’s death took a far greater toll on Cole than he would even admit to himself. The death of Erin’s mother, Ellie, a painful as it was, after their short reunion, was a kind of closure and healing for Cole. He carried her in his heart so long and so deep, no one else ever touched the memory of her love, or the sorrow of his losing her. For more than twenty years, that small corner of his heart was locked and kept him from his finding happiness.
Everything Cole built in the last five years seemed to be crumbling around him: his job and the loss of Hanna. The loss seemed a monument to the mortality he felt he was immune to. The joy of Ben turning down the job in Houston, his own teaching position at Stanford, most of all his engagement and marriage to Kelly—these events should all be cause for celebration and elation.
Yet, for the first time in his life Cole was seeing the end. The tape at the finish line seemed to be just beyond the horizon. Retirement, old age, sickness, death—things that no longer just happened to other people. If he took care of himself, he may have twenty, twenty-five more years. Then again…both his parents had passed before they turned sixty-five.
While driving to Kelly’s, Cole made a vow that he would live his life differently—stop and smell the roses, as they say. He would marry Kelly, spend a few years teaching, enjoying the new media platform Randy would create, see Erin and her family more, and watch Jenny grow.
“Kelly, let’s get married,” Cole blurted out.
Kelly smiled and held up her right hand. She wiggled her fingers showing Cole her ring. “We are. Remember?”
“No. I mean right away. Now. Why wait? I want to, you want to, let’s do it.”
“What brought this on?”
“Time. It is a finite thing. I don’t want to waste anymore more of it without you next to me. Morning and night I want to be beside you. Begin and end my day for the rest of my life with the one I love.”
“Oh, sweetheart,”
Kelly began to tear up.
“Oh, now don’t start that. I asked Ben to be best man. I told him I want to do it pronto. He loved the idea.”
“You thought this through, huh? This isn’t just some spur-of-the-moment thing?” Kelly seemed genuinely surprised at Cole thoughtfulness.
“Of course! Look, when I start at Stanford, I won’t be able to drive from where I live now. You’re here temporarily, right? We need to find a place near Palo Alto. Which will be cool because we’ll be closer to the kids than we are now. It will be a fresh start. A new life for both of us. What do you say?”
“Gosh, I don’t know…”Kelly goaded Cole.
“Huh?”
“Well, yes of course!”
“OK. Let’s plan on it. Could we have the ceremony like, on a Sunday after church?” Cole asked.
“What a wonderful idea! We could have a lunch reception in the Fellowship Hall!” “A lot of your friends will already be there. We can invite whoever.”
“What about your friends?”
“I think they can both make it,” Cole teased.
“I’m being serious, Olajean, and your detective friend in Chicago, Frank. Who else?”
Cole ignored the question and went on. “The morning worship band can play a song or two, or not. The pastor is already there, right. Seems easy.”
“It sounds perfect! I’ll call him tomorrow.”
“Call him now, book a date,” Cole insisted. “You two are friends, right?”
“You really want me to?”
“Yeah, why not?”
“Why not, indeed!” Kelly reached for the phone.
Cole woke ready to take on the world. He literally jumped from bed, sang in the shower, ate a bagel and, to celebrate, he made himself two mochas. The mix-CD in the stereo seemed the perfect soundtrack for his drive to work. He sang, and pounded out rhythms on the steering wheel, totally oblivious to the heavy traffic, and the idiots who darted in and out of the lanes in front of him.
Cole got to work fifteen minutes late. Nobody noticed. He asked the janitor he passed on the way to his office to bring him a few boxes. One would be for Hanna’s things. The rest he would use to pack his few belongings. When Cole left work the night before, his leather shoulder bag was bulging with all of his notebooks.
Heart of Cole Page 22